Speech Intelligibility and the Production of Fricative and Affricate among Mandarin-speaking Children with Cerebral Palsy

Speech Intelligibility and the Production of Fricative and Affricate among Mandarin-speaking Children with Cerebral Palsy Chin-Ting Jimbo Liu Department of Foreign Languages and Literature National Cheng Kung University K28011032@mail.ncku.edu.tw Li-mei Chen Department of Foreign Languages and Literature National Cheng Kung University leemay@mail.ncku.edu.tw Yu-Ching Lin Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, College of Medicine, National Cheng Kung University richelin@mail.ncku.edu.tw Chia-Fang Anna Cheng Department of Foreign Languages and Literature National Cheng Kung University anna17nut@gmail.com Hui-chen Jennifer Chang Department of Foreign Languages and Literature National Cheng Kung University garr07nni@gmail.com Abstract Literatures pertaining to English and Mandarin fricative/affricate productions by adults with cerebral palsy (CP) showed that acoustic measurements such as rise time contrast, initial burst rate contrast and friction noise duration contrast associated with fricative/affricate productions were highly correlated with overall speech intelligibility. However, the phonetic features of fricatives/affricates produced by Mandarin-learning children with CP were not fully explored. Therefore, this study targets on fricatives/affricates produced by ten Mandarin-learning CP children (Mean: 6;10, Range: 4;6 – 8;11) and ten Mandarin-learning typically developing children (Mean: 5;7, Range: 5;2 – 6;1). The current results from a speech repetition task showed that: 1) The fricative/affricate accurate rates and error patterns were similar between the two The 2016 Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing ROCLING 2016, pp. 153-163  The Association for Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing 153 groups; 2) The differences between the two groups in terms of nine acoustic measurements (fricative/affricate rise time, initial burst rate, friction noise duration and their contrasts) and speech intelligibility were not statistically significant; 3) The rise time contrast was an effective contributor to overall speech intelligibility for CP children. Together with previous studies, the current study concluded that rise time contrast was the most significant contributor, among fricative/affricate measurements, to speech intelligibility across different age ranges. Keywords: Children with cerebral palsy, Fricative, Affricate, Speech intelligibility, Mandarin Chinese. 1. Introduction Improving cerebral palsy (CP) children’s intelligibility is a key goal of speech therapy [1]. Therefore, identifying the contributing factors for speech intelligibility becomes of significant importance. There is a large body of literature available on probing into the acoustic features related to speech intelligibility. For instance, several studies focused on the relationship among the acoustic features of vowels and speech intelligibility in English [1], [2], [3] and in Chinese [4], [5]. The relationship between speech intelligibility and the lengths of vowels [2], [3], [6], [7] and the relationship between speech intelligibility and the speech rates [5], [6], [7] were also explored in details in the literature. However, the relationship between fricative/affricate productions and speech intelligibility received relatively little attention. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the acoustic features of fricative/affricate productions made by Mandarin-acquiring CP children. The understanding of the acoustical features of the segments produced by CP children bears significant clinical applications. For instance, language therapists might be able to adjust their program and course design based on the current results in order to cope with the need of CP children. 1.1 Acoustic features …

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